Sea Control - Sea Control 459 - The Influence of EEZs on the Development of Norwegian, Danish & Canadian Naval Forces with Dr. Tim Choi

Episode Date: September 3, 2023

"Controlling the Northern Seas: The Influence of Exclusive Economic Zones on the Development of Norwegian, Danish, and Canadian Naval Forces," by Dr. Tim Choi, University of Calgary PRISM Repository, December 12, 2022

Hello, and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. Today, Jared speaks with Dr. Tim Choi to discuss his dissertation, which explores the development of Norwegian, Danish, and Canadian naval forces. Jonathan Selling edited and produced this episode. Here at Sea Control, we are approaching our 300th episode since our relaunch, and we would like to dedicate a show to answering your questions. If you would like to submit a question, please email us at seacontrol at simsec.org. I would like to pause here to highlight our local chapters. Whether you are in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of local chapters and contact information on our website at simsec.org. So if you are interested, please reach out. Finally, I want to take this opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec podcast network, The Village Pumps.

You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. Aloha, showmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Tim Choi. We'll be discussing his dissertation, Controlling the Northern Seas, the Influence of Exclusive Economic Zones on the Development of Norwegian, Danish, and Canadian Naval Forces. Tim, welcome aboard. First time that you get to appear as Dr. Tim Choi, so excited to have you, get to address you by your new title here, but can you start by refreshing the listeners a little bit on your background, please? Thanks, Jared, and thanks for having me back again. It's always

nice to be back on Sea Control. Yeah, so my name's Tim Choi. I'm a doctor, I suppose. I just finished my PhD at the University of Calgary at the Center for Military Security and Strategic Studies. My dissertation is on, as you just heard from Jared, the Norwegian, Danish, and Canadian naval forces and how they sort of adapted to the institution of the exclusive economic zone, both in the short term and the long term. And annoyingly, I'm one of the few people in Canada who studies um naval and maritime affairs so it's come it's become sort of on me to sort of learn everything anything about naval and maritime issues in this country so even though my dissertation focused on constabulary issues and i'm talking about submarines most recently and then some

anti-submarine warfare anti-air warfare NORAD i even get go to news sometimes talk about ukraine which is not at all what i do but it's uh you know ends up being you know sort of a master of or like jack-of-all-trades in the military space is because Canada really doesn't have a very big traditional security studies field these days, which is most unfortunate, especially as we're embarking upon this national ship-loving strategy that replaces all of our naval and Coast Guard fleets

at a cost of over $100 billion just for the procurement alone. It seems kind of crazy that there isn't more of a civilian and academic study of this stuff, but there it is. Well, that is a little disappointing, especially given that at the close of World War II, I want to say Canada was the third largest navy in the world after the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy. I mean, there were aircraft carriers, and Canada bore the largest burden as far as the Battle of the Atlantic was concerned, if you look at ship numbers. So any thoughts about why that lack of interest persisted there afterwards?

It's a good question. I think for a long time, actually, during the Cold War, we had a very healthy maritime studies cohort that survived through it and even through to the end of the Cold War, toward its 90s and beginning of 2000s. There's still a very healthy number of academics who study naval and maritime issues. But, you know, over time, they kind of, you know, they will, we'll ask you, you know, fade away. And unfortunately, I think the post-Cold War turned towards, you know, non-traditional security issues meant that a lot of, you know, new professors who were being hired, you know, focused on, you know, the new wars, quote unquote, the terrorism, extremism, that kind of, those kinds of issues, nuclear non-proliferation, you know, all the new so-called new wars that were cropping up during that time period. And of course, I mean, that falls into what navies do as well. But, you know, very few people look at it from that lens, that navies were anything more than just warfighting assets or deterrence assets. And so my dissertation looks into that a little bit there. But, yeah, Canada certainly ended off the Second World War, third largest fleet by sheer number of ships.

Of course, most of those were the little flower class for corvettes, little river class brigades, that kind of thing. But we did end with getting, in 1946, our first owned aircraft carrier. And that became the first of three that we would own, one after the other, until 1970. And those were all as part of our gradual acceptance, or rather not so gradual, it was fairly quick, acceptance of our role as an ASW-centric force in the North Atlantic. But for a brief period after the war, after the Second World War, we weren't quite sure what we'd be doing with our Navy. You know, at that time, a big concern was that, well, maybe the Americans were our greatest threat to sovereignty. And, you know, a big reason for having any Navy at all in this new time of peace was to just ensure that the Americans don't do our defense for us.

and you know that's why we sort of had this uh quote-unquote workable little fleet of you know one aircraft carrier a couple of light cruisers um you know a dozen destroyers or so and then that will help you know ensure that we can keep an eye on at least our uh you know our waters in around the coasts um but then you know shortly after that it became obvious that there will be a need to do some of that anti-submarine work once more and we went whole hog on the ASW efforts in terms of our fleet force structure. So we didn't really have that broad spectrum of capabilities that, you know, the larger navies did. And we really focused down on ASW to the detriment of pretty much everything else. So, you know, not much for anti-surface

warfare, not much for anti-air warfare, not much for land bombardment. And this, and, you know, it was most clearly evident in the procurement of our St. Laurent class destroyed escorts and their derivatives, all of which, you know, focused on equipping themselves with long-range sonars, ASW torpedoes, you know, and disarmament rockets, that kind of thing. And, you know, only a handful of, you know, three-inch guns for basic self-defense. So, but they were the most advanced ships of their time, you know, and a very innovative type of vessel. I'm not sure, you know we're be able to do that kind of thing today i remember reading that uh there was essentially a blank check that was given to that particular project because nobody knew how much

it would cost i mean nowadays of course we see for canadian service combatant which replaces our entire service fleet um it's you know every time we you know the news articles and the discussions always revolve about how much we expect them to cost you know some articles you know put these estimates as though they're for certain as though they know exactly that this is how much they're kind of cost, or, you know, what all that cost includes. But in reality, I don't think anybody really knows until, you know, the final, at least until the first ship is built, and then, you know, figure out from there. So, you know, that's the big thing about, you know, shipbuilding in countries where we don't really have too much of experience doing that, with the cost estimations

and such. So a lot of that comes down to, well, you know, you need these things. So, you know, do you you know wring your hands over how much it costs or you just go ahead and do it and then you know once you know how much it costs then you can start you know deciding well maybe we'll stop at you know this amount of ships or that amount of ships or start building something else but then you do that and then you start having to come a new project office paper for that to new design work that adds more time to everything and that then increases the cost of the whole thing as you encounter more and more delays because you decided that you're going to design new ships instead of you know, just going to the one that you've already been building, Rambly.

But I think that's sort of a general, my general feeling towards the procurement, at least in this country. Well, let me put a silver lining on the on the lack of your peers in a maritime studies cohort in Canada. If you're the first one and you're sort of like the leading edge of a renaissance in Canadian maritime thought, then we could just be 50 to 60 years away from an HMCS Dr. Tim Choi if you are the one who indeed turns the tide I'm afraid I won't be

I'm most likely going into hiding away in government for at least a few years after this given this poor state of the academic job market at least in terms of pay with

ever increasing housing crisis so yeah I'm going to go there for a while until an opportunity crops up perhaps to come back out from the cold. That's okay. You can influence things from there as well. It will all be part of the greater story that's captured on the core deck of HMCS, Dr. Tim Choi. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions today are our own

and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated, to include any future Canadian surface combatants named after Dr. Tim Choi. Tim, why did you choose these three countries for your study? Great question. So all of this really began, I guess, in my master's when I was actually, my main focus was on the U.S. Navy and mine warfare. So that was back in, I think, 2013 or so. And one of the courses I took during that time was on Canadian Arctic security. And during that, my paper was on a comparison of our, still on paper at that time, Herod the Wolf class Arctic offshore patrol ships and how they compare with our allies abroad,

so the norwegians and danes so it's a very you know short 20 30 page paper that looked at strictly you know sort of general capabilities that were well known at a time sort of what we might expect them to do and that really got my attention on well why do these nordic navies have um you know such brand new vessels were they you know who would expect to be fighting or were they expecting to be doing with these things um and i was sort of at that time also that you had a you know a large number of commentary in the canadian discourse that were you know whinging a lot about how our arctic patrol ships were under armed or they're just slush breakers quote unquote and how the danes and norwegians they got they got ice breakers you know with uh anti-air missiles

anti-surface missiles anti-submarine torpedoes you know all these things that they supposedly had um that made and they were so cheap you know just a quarter of the price that we'd be paying for them etc etc um and then i was just looking at this i'm like that doesn't seem you know entirely that doesn't seem likely that that's the whole picture there's got to be more behind this than what the wikipedia articles are saying so you know i decided to make that at least the starting point of my or the uh driving sort of uh impetus behind why i was interested in this topic and why i want to look at these uh countries and their ships um and then eventually you know that's not really a very good um research proposal uh but um because people with the

commentary piss me off it's not really sufficient so um you know i had came up with something else that was a little bit more um refined and so i came up with two basic research question which was um you know how did these countries how did this economic zone that you know turn all these countries that were traditionally focused on coastal defense issues into blue water concerns into countries that had to deal with blue water issues um what did they do to you know adapt them into traveling out to 200 nautical miles beyond the shore what was like what was the short-term you know effects of that on their force structures emissions and then what was the long-term effects of those um and then at the same time there was

the other uh theoretical um question about well do small and large navies differ all that much If they do differ, how do they differ? And, you know, that was, you know, one of my first, you know, presentations, academic conferences was on small navies, was at a small navies conference where they discussed this issue at a theoretical discussion on, you know, what are differences between small and large? Can you have a uniform difference between the smaller and larger navies? And, you know, what is the best way to characterize these differences? are there um you know traditionally we've had sort of the um eric grove style hierarchy of you know these you know global force projection navy versus you know coastal defense navies um but you know how does that work when you have for example as you know i've talked about my

dissertation um you know the norwegians and danes you know they're supposedly coastal navies by most counts but then they have these massive offshore patrol vessels that sail well beyond 200 nautical miles and they're well and present and a constant presence in territories far overseas and so that seems to be a merger of both you know this global if not quite global at least regional force projection versus a local self-defense force and you know I was interested in how you have these two different ideas that aren't really captured in the traditional sea power literature when they're talking about ranking categorizing navies so you know that's uh i got into choosing these three topics and of course i wanted to you know from a more academic perspective i want to control

for a number of variables including governance types wealth and everything like that so um you know i chose the three nato members well all three are you know modern democracies with strong institutional, you know, respect for the rule of law and a great understanding of how international law and agreements and treaties all sort of work together and are accepted, but all of which are part of the same alliance. So you don't have one country that has the, you know, U.S. umbrella and one that doesn't, but all of which are also bordering the Arctic Ocean in some respects. So the issue of ice and the future issue

and the ongoing issue I guess of climate change and melting sea ice and how does that affect these things towards the modern day. In terms of scope, I go all the way from pretty much the interwar area to the near future just because

of how long these shipbuilding programs take, not just from the shipbuilding program design themselves, but also the recognition of what is needed in terms of sea power outputs and you know it takes a decade to come up with what your new defense posture is like and decade sort of alongside that to determine what kind of ship you need um then you know five another 10 years to build the things and then you know those ships are around for now 30 to 40 if not 50 years and then during that time you you know start to think

of you learn your lessons from previous ones that you start the whole cycle again you build the next one and then by that point maybe something has changed in the geopolitical situation that requires you to rethink about you know your floor core structure overall and so you know i take this uh you know this multi-decade approach to really give you it give us all a about you know a both the detailed uh assessment of each of these individual um vessels or the major vessels that was interested in the offshore the offshore patrol vessels and large frigates um but also to look at, you know, how did they each contribute to their country's overall security postures during those time periods.

So you don't have to go super deep on each of these three, but maybe if you can just kind of provide us a brief summary of what were the roles, responsibilities, capabilities of each of these three navies as the Cold War wound down, and then how did their respective missions change at the end of the Cold War? Well, so I'm going to start from, you know, east to west. So with Norway, back in the 1970s, you know, in preparation for the institution of the 200-knock Maui set, or, you know, the EF set for them, the exclusive fisheries zone, and then the fisheries protection zone of Svalbard, while they were establishing distinct Coast Guard institution underneath their Navy. And at that time, during the 70s, they also explored the acquisition of dedicated armed offshore patrol vessels instead of the current method, which was the leased civilian vessels for these constabulary missions. And during the 80s and 90s, after UNCLOS and the domestic laws were passed, they acquired dedicated armed offshore patrol vessels that have a secondary wartime mission because they're so close to the Soviets.

So these are the Nordcat class. They also got additional offshore leased civilian vessels to further augment these force, these dedicated vessels. And then, of course, they eventually, by the 90s, decided that this new EEZ is going to require some blue water, high-end warfighting capability as well to help defend those resources, such as oil and gas. And so these are the Nassau-class frigates that were built. Originally, their requirements were for ASW, and that was the core warfighting requirement. But of course, the size, general capability of a helicopter, these were determined by the fact that they wanted to operate regularly in the exclusive economic zone. And so, you know, the new NASA class was several times larger than the previous also class brigades that they had. So it's an interesting combination there where you have a war fighting asset that is also charged with constabulary issues, despite having a dedicated Coast Guard for such things.

Now, of course, the long-term consequences of this following, you know, long-term consequences of these adaptations for the ESET is that the OBVs were, as you might expect, predominantly used at home. They didn't have to be sent abroad very much. And the NASA and CLASP were built with, you know, that long endurance seeking in mind. For the ESET defense, well, they actually became suitable for global operations as well. So they sell with U.S. carrier strike groups. One of them has even been sent to Hawaii for impact, mostly as a sort of a showpiece for the naval strike missile that the Norwegians invented and have now become sort of standard anti-shipping missile of this current next generation. so you know a lot of things happening there uh for denmark there's a lot of talking here uh denmark um you know they continue their existing constabulary centric fleet under the navy and what i mean by that is that ever since the 1500s the um the danish navy has had a presence

far overseas in greenland and iceland back when iceland was part of the danish realm um and they always had a strong fisheries protection uh role uh for under nation in the danish navy and so you know as part of this uh he said preparation stuff they didn't really had to do much that was new didn't have to create a new um postcard anything that's added an additional opv um that was basically based on the existing design uh so this was back in 1975 and but then in the um decade following they knew that they had to you know instead of just transiting the north atlantic to greenland and operating in the you know the territory waters they now had to actually operate in the blue water regularly

in the 200 nautical mile zone and not just transit it. And so they built even bigger OPVs. So it went from the 1,700 ton Fitbjorn class of the 1960s and they've now got up to the 3,500 ton Thetis class that are still in operation today. And, you know, what's interesting thing about the Thetis class is that they're supposedly modular with the Stanflex system. You know, they've got the slots built into them

And there was a lot of concerns in Parliament at the time between the more, you know, disarmament-centric parties versus the more conservative parties. And, you know, some of them were saying, well, you know, are these ships going to be built with the capability to be turned into actual frigates? And it turns out, you know, eventually that side did win. You know, the potential for frigatization was technically there, physically there, but it was never actually practiced in real life. there was never an attempt to integrate any of the um you know modular missile or torpedo capabilities into the thetis class and so their modular slots were only ever used for craning ribs on boarding off so it's one of those interesting things where the uh you know the promised modularity didn't really live up to a practice there wasn't really a thing that was

exercise so you know technically you could put them in but you know there's no the hookups uh probably wouldn't have communicated with combat system or anything like that there's no real sensors that would fit it and you know again one of those uh challenges of a modularity um and so that uh you know it's legacy and during this post-cold war era when these countries more interested in the expeditionary role you know in the mediterranean and then the gulf war as well um legacy war fighting fleet were a bit small you know they're mostly coastal defense ships um and so they took a lot of effort to get them over to these uh far away places and had to move entire logistical chains um you know by air to nearby ports uh to make that happen they had to

uh you know send heavy lift ships to carry some of the smaller vessels even a submarine um you know to and from home that kind of thing um and so you know in terms of the long-term consequences then you know the fetus class designed for operations around the north atlantic for constabulary issues well since they're the largest vessels in the danish fleet uh they end up being employed for constabulary, diplomatic, and scientific missions around the globe from down in Antarctica-ish to anti-piracy to basically a sailpiece for Danish equipment to Southeast Asia.

So they did all that until the formal long-range expeditionary warfighting fleet could be completed. And those sort of frigates that they now have in service, the Absalon I'm a Haifa Hufa class 5 number right now. So for Canada, though, as the medium-sized country that serves as the foil for the two smaller ones, that's basically why I chose it, plus the fact that I'm Canadian, so I have to. Back in prelude to UNCLOS, they did acquire a few unarmed civilian OBVs, so the Cape Roger and Cygnus classes, or Cygnus.

those are the two ships um and they only had to really buy these two um because they really just focus on using the warfighting navy's assets um for all these blue water missions because of course unlike the other two countries our warfighting vessels our frigates our destroyers you know they had blue water capability because the blue water was where they expected to perform asw and so it's very easy for us to just readapt those for these constabulary missions and the way we do that in a legal sense would simply have civilian law enforcement personnel put them on board and then they'll provide a ship with the law enforcement authority needed to carry out arrests and interdictions in Canadian waters. But, you know, as time went on and sort of toward the

1980s, as more and more violations became apparent, they decided to actually arm the civilian OPVs as well. So there's a new armed boarding program where the boarding officers now had uh you know mp5 machine guns and uh you know the 50 cal guns were equipped onto the obvs and they ordered two more obvs um to add to the mix and so and at the same time they allocated more hours uh for the navy's uh you know frigates to conduct fisheries patrols and you know so with you know it was an interesting combination of both um you know buying a bit more ships putting more armaments on them as well as re-rolling um you know the war fighting fleets which were to be honest getting a bit old at by that point uh putting in towards the fisheries patrol mission

and you know what's interesting is that the um our frigates the newest ones the halifax class that were you know being built in the late 80s and came online the 90s and still serves today um you know the 12 frigates they weren't really designed with a constabulary mode of mind um but nonetheless because they were meant for operations far overseas. You know, they were built in a time that we had the forward, you know, the forward strategy of NATO in the far north. So they were kind of expected to fight, you know, against air threats as well while they're hunting submarines.

So they had all sorts of, you know, the normal complement of multi-mission capabilities. But, you know, that made them suitable for fisheries patrols as well, though they weren't really used as much for that. and we have sort of this period of the mid-90s sort of intensification of these sea control operations against illegal fishers off the east coast of Canada and you see us even using submarines for that role and of course us firing a few actual live rounds

against Spanish fishing trawlers to try to bring things to a stop and ultimately our so-called victory in the 1995 Turbo War against Spain, you know, the victory there embodied in a, you know, institutionalized measure that allowed, you know,

different, the NAFO, the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization to sort of have a greater hands-on role in ensuring proper and legal fishing activities aboard vessels with neutral observers. And that was sort of a long-term solution to this whole thing. And, you know, our victory there meant that we didn't really have to spend as much effort on doing, you know, sea control activities using naval or Coast Guard or fisheries patrol vessels as we used to have to.

And so, you know, our, you know, that kind of constabulary mission sort of went down, the coastal constabulary mission off our Canadian coast sort of went down by the wayside by the late 90s and 2000s. So, you know, we're sort of, you know, regaining that capability with our new Arctic patrol ships, just because we expect to have a bit more concern of that in the Arctic in the future. So you mentioned the concept of controlling the seas a couple times in that last answer as well as in the title of the dissertation. Do these three countries view the concept of sea control similarly or where do they differ? yeah so when i talk about sea control here i think most people of course look at it in terms of that wartime effort right of uh testing control and exercising control um to do wartime things that for me you know i look at it from jeffrey till's uh four different uses of the seas um use the sea as a medium transport as a resource as a you know as a form of power projection

for science and so for me you know you can use sea control you know to contest ways of doing each of those four things and exercising the way you do each of those four things as well and for me of course here I'm looking mostly at the fisheries issue which is you know the resource side using the seas as a resource and how we can test control of the seas for using the seas as a resource and then exercising that right and i think you know for the four three countries involved i think that the main difference is how many of them or the extent to which each of them are willing to just let institutionalized measures of control take over from the coercive compulsive side of control and compulsive i mean you know

the ships of guns is basically is the most obvious way of doing it versus institutional measures that we all agree to, such as, you know, new Trump servers through NAFO and, you know, the UN Stratting Stocks Agreement, that kind of thing. And I think we see Canada being willing to, you know, settle on this, you know, we'll have one or two sharp actions here and there, and that will be the one to establish a long-term solution for institutional measures, you know, that are ultimately much cheaper to maintain and institute. And those are, and that becomes, that solves the problem for, you know, for good, quote unquote, for a long period of time. Whereas, you know, the Norwegian and Danes, you know, they're still quite concerned about,

you know, violations of their nearby fisheries. And so they still maintain a very high level of armed, compulsive Coast Guard constabulary power to patrol their maritime spaces. So they're, I mean, that's the basic takeaway, if you will. and you see this sort of continuing on today very much so as I think we're going to bring up the whole

how does Russia change things and certainly for the two smaller countries they're much closer, the threat is much more acute and you see their new next generation OPVs or the thoughts behind next generation OPVs it maintains sort of the relatively

high level of combat capability not as high as some of the Canadian skeptics would like to emphasize, but still very much there. And it shows a sort of greater impetus and understanding that, well, you might need, you know, power of an actual, you know, large caliber gun behind you

for controlling that gray zone escalation that's much more likely in their areas. All right, so apropos Russia, how have each of these navies evolved their approaches to procurement and deployment? And what do you anticipate moving forward? You talked about, you had sort of looked at the near future, but how does it look going forward as we see a belligerent Russia? All three

of these countries really do share some form of maritime border with Russia. Yeah. So, you know, starting with Norway, I think their current generation, the ones that are just being delivered right now, the new OVVs, you know, 9,800 tons of Jan Mayan class. They replaced the over the Nordkapp class, which are roughly only around 3,500 tons or so. So it's quite a big increase in size. It's not quite sure where that size is going to. They still keep basically the same 57mm gun in the bow. They maintain the same TRS-3D radar at the top.

Technically, I think they could put two helicopters on it if they want, or rather, if they can get a helicopter working. It's just one of those things, you know, one of the famous disappointments, I guess, in the Norwegian military establishments, the failure of their NH90 helicopter program. You know, that was supposed to be the biggest sea change in their blue water capability since, you know, the end of the Second World War. You now have helicopters on ships or rather you now have ships of helicopter decks and hangars. but unfortunately uh the apparently unsolvable um issues of the nh90 meant that they're now being returned to sender and they're gonna get some seahawks instead uh and that's still ongoing so you know they went and tried the nh90 for you know 10 years or so try to get them working at a

respectable availability rate couldn't do it um and so now we have a bunch of very large ships with no helicopters on them so you know you're kind of back to uh back to the 70s 80s kind of situation which is most unfortunate um anyway but yeah so you know they have the uh so that's the coast guard side of things for large vessels um but then you also have the nansen class which of course they did build um not necessarily to fight the russians but you know there's still a major concern but now you know they're looking into well replacing these as well um especially after they had this lost one of them in that oil tanker collision yeah so that's going to come up soon in the next you know 10 years can decide whether to how many new frigates they're going

to be building where from you know how big what capabilities can be building um because obviously right now they each only have eight vls cells one of them has 16 so you know not a lot even when you quad pack them with the ssms um so you know it's a it's definitely a you know one of those things there are no reason thinking well you know it's time to really you know do the whole hedgehog thing again uh you know real back more of the area than now capabilities uh for the danes that they definitely see uh you know there was time there um where they thought everything would be just out of area operations and you know the need for heavy armaments isn't really present anymore and we sort of see this with the fetus class uh they're off the offshore patrol ships earlier i

talked about how they're built with modular potential that was never lived up to um and And, you know, they certainly seem to have agreed with their midlife refit back in that occurred in 2015 or so. And during that refit, they actually took out those modeler spaces and put, you know, large enclosed hangers for the ribs. So to really permanently put that to rest. So, you know, at that time, they clearly felt that, you know, just about 76 millimeter gun would be, you know, all you really need. but as we're moving towards in sort of the post-Ukraine invasion era you'll see the Danish discussions moving towards replacing the theist class with new much more heavy armed perhaps an ice-capable best version of the frigates that they have in service right now with full air

surveillance and combat capabilities so less of an OBV and more of a ice-capable frigate that'll you know fill that role and certainly for Denmark you know sending warships for constabulary missions uh overseas for sovereignty protection that's nothing new for them it's been something i've been doing for you know 500 years so you know it's a sort of old hat uh it's not too foreign for them um but it is a would be a market increase in their fleets capabilities for sure whether they can afford to do so is a whole different question um these things do not come cheap and you know the danish shipyard that uh had built the latest uh you know frigates you know they basically went out of business um following that so um you know they don't not

sure maersk even uh you know builds many container ships uh in denmark anymore and most of them from korea now or china so you know the domestic ship construction capacity isn't really the same as it used to be so again the big challenge is there uh for canada um you know we have our shipbuilding program and you know we have our uh hair dwarf class our patrol ship 6800 tons of steel um you know they are you know they're not slush breakers you know contrary to our old commentariat you know they margaret broke during her ice trial she encountered two meters of ice you know that's well beyond the 1.2 meters that are rated for um so you know and you know it's pretty high up there and they're biblical up there to uh the canadian arctic when nobody else is up there because you

know who else can be really unless the russians decide to send like an icebreaker intra waters but then you're like what for um that's always a big question to follow you know people always are scared that you know russians are going to come into canada's arctic um but they have to ask themselves what for you know why would they be there um you know you send are they going to land some troops on you know one of them thousands of little islands up there and then what claim it or you know what's their what's the goal there what's their uh you know what's the purpose of doing so are they gonna you know lob some cruise missiles at you know iqaluit you know that kind of thing it's a it's always a big question once you're there then what um but nobody really seems

to have a good answer for that uh sort of it being a prelude to all nuclear war which i think we have bigger problems than that then so anyway so you know our a officer arctic patrol ships we you know they have they're perfectly meant for constabulary issues armed with a you know climate control 25 millimeter gun on a bow uh which you know a lot of people are like well that's too small you can't really use it against the too many targets and i was like well true but you know you got to keep in mind these are constabulary missions um you know in all my studies of the danish fleets you know with their 76 millimeter gun they've never really been able to use it in the constabulary context because you know by the time you escalate things to where you

need the 76 millimeter gun you're already well within range of boarding actions of within you know 50 cal a gun action and you know even at that even the 50 cal requires you to basically ask the politicians the ministers deputy ministers for explicit permission to do so it's not something that you you know start doing you can start lobbing rounds at any errant suspected fishermen that you find and so having a large weapon like that is not particularly usable not particularly usable not very practical and you know i think for that context a 25 millimeter gun a bit smaller more precise you know that's a much more uh practical and uh actually believable a credible weapon um in the future conflict over fisheries in our arctic ocean um and that's sort of the

expectation in terms of the most severe kind of um you know security threat we see up in the high north um that doesn't you know automatically escalate to something that's unforgivable so there's that but you know in terms of the actual war fighting side of things that's where our Canadian service combatants are really coming into play basically what we're going to do is replace all of our frigates with the capabilities of our destroyers that we had decommissioned several years ago

and so you know instead of having the 16 ESSM's like our Halifax's our CSE's basically have the 29 Mark 41 cells and then 6 extended launch systems and those 6 extended launch systems they're meant for

quad packs of C-Septar missiles so it's you know a massive increase from 16 missiles to basically you know if you quad pack every single one of those cells uh those 30 cells then that's like 120 missiles uh so that's a lot um obviously we're not going to fill them all with the same kind of uh missiles but that's just to give you a general sense of just how much that capability is increasing um even if each individual ship doesn't quite have the same number of cells as um you know the american destroyers or some of are the large frigates start floating around um and you know but the big risky thing for us is that we decided uh to accept the lucky market proposal to put their spy 7 radars as the main

phase array suites on cscs and that's something that well you know besides us uh the japanese and the spain um you know nobody else is really using it and so in terms of the long-term support and development of new capabilities that are innate to those antennas, we suffer a bit from having to perhaps do more of that research on our own, instead of simply borrowing the research that would have already been done by the US Navy for SPY-6, for example, that they've been using. So that's one of the considerations. But nonetheless, it's quite a massive expansion of our fleet's capabilities while maintaining the traditional focus on anti-submarine warfare. And of course, right now we have our submarine replacement program, our prospective submarine replacement program, which would replace our four Victoria class with some unknown number of future submarines, if they will in fact be full-size crewed submarines.

What we do know is that it's very unlikely that they'll be nuclear powered, even though that would be the most obvious solution, the most tried and true and reliable solution to our defense needs in terms of, you know, expeditionary operations overseas, which is what we mostly do for Navy, as well as under ice surveillance in our Arctic and in the Central Arctic. and those are you know and but you know nuclear is something that's a you know we have sort of we've trifled around with um you know twice in the past and didn't really get anywhere and the cost of that was just too high watering for um you know us i guess quote unquote us and so very much uh leaning towards and basically the navy uh the head of our navy um agrees that you know a large diesel electric submarine is sort of what we're what is most practical in terms of both capabilities and likelihood of being procured successfully. So that's sort of where we're leading towards.

Well, I'm sorry. That's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Tim Choi. Tim, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? You can find me on Twitter at Tim Doc Choi. And what am I working on next? I'm trying to turn my dissertation into a book. So, you know, if anybody wants to publish a thing on, you know, the development of Arctic navies or Arctic adjacent navies

in the near future. Well, thank you again for joining us. If you're listening to this as part of an exhibit at a Canadian Maritime History Museum 100 years in the future on the namesake of the HMCS, Dr. Tim Choi, I just want you to know that when we're referring to ice at the poles, that is the thing that used to exist here in the year 2023. So if it's a foreign concept to you

and Northern Canada is now a tropical destination where you and your friends go, that's why we're referring to that. But thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. I walked up to the borough counter Where I met with Greedy Annie There I met with Greedy Annie

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Pour it on the shimbo now © transcript Emily Beynon